An interview with Tom ‘Tomme’ Elvey

Community Launcher

In this installment of a number of upcoming interview series, I have been given the opportunity to speak with no other than Tom ‘Tomme’ Elvey, a prestigious member within the community whose initiative proved to be more than popular with the introduction of the ‘Call of Duty – Community Launcher’.

For those of you who are unaware, Tom ‘Tomme’ Elvey specifically designed the launcher as a way of expanding the current limitations and horizons our scene meets today, introducing a more vibrant approach to candidates and functionality as a whole.



- Hello Tom, I’d just like to thank you for taking the time to endure this interview; it’s always difficult talking about personal endeavours and current development plans, but we’re all anticipating the eagerly awaited release. For anyone who is unfamiliar with yourself, could you briefly introduce yourself along with any additional information you may like to add?

Hiya! I'm Tom Elvey or as most people know me, Tomme. I grew up playing Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory then later moved on Call of Duty 4 when it was released, during my time playing COD4 I have participated in two iSeries and multiple online events. While running several popular Enemy Territory servers I noticed a lack of individualism on my servers which was very important due to amount of customisation possible in that game, this is where I can say I started, I created custom menus, including the ability to listen to a radio in game similar to HL2 games, then moving on to altering the actual game play. These endeavours in modifying Enemy Territory pushed me to start learning programming, even if it was very slow at first.

Now I am a member of the CyberGamer staff where I help with administrating COD4.

- Now, let’s get down to business. Can you tell us how you initially came to develop the idea of introducing a ‘Community Launcher’ and what your expectations were?

Well during the drama that was started by D1ablo with his, “Let’s try and improve the scene” or whatever the topic title was, several people mentioned, I would mention their names if I could remember, that compared to most modern games COD4 was a pain to update, having the search correct patch on the internet and installing them in the correct order. These criticisms of COD4 fuelled the idea of having a tool much like many modern games have an auto updating tool. I was pretty bored and wondered how hard could it be? Within about three hours I had a basic tool which could download the correct file based on your COD4 version and install it, from here I thought of just developing it into a small auto updating tool but then people gave me there ideas and it grew.

- With that being said, could you tell us how the initial stages of development began? Most importantly with a few sentences describing how you maintained your focus and motivation despite continuously working on a project with no beneficial reward?

The initial planned stages of the project where simple questions I asked myself. How could I detect someone’s COD4 version? If the tool needed to be updated how will I achieve this? When people started showing a real interest I had to focus on the software ease of use, which then involved planning such how could I update certain aspects, such as the current ProMod version without forcing the user to update this tool.
Throughout any project there is issues with motivation and focus especially when it is only you working on it, the ultimate goal of the project was to help people get into COD4 a lot easier and help grow the scene, even if the scene only grows by five people. Helping me to keep motivated was the idea of helping a scene which has given me so much, from many great friends who I have played with now for over three years to the hours and hours of fun in a game which would not be here if it was not for these people.

- Let’s talk about changes. In your eyes, has the community’s insight been of suffice value to you whilst developing the launcher and what kind of ideas have you incorporated due to this information?

Oh boy, the launcher would be nothing what it is today without the community’s input. The community just wanted more and more, started with, “How about adding the ability to update you PB”, then growing into “Feature the latest fragmovies”. Besides the many ideas the community gave, they also offered there invaluable feedback on the functionality of the launcher and without this it would probably be a giant mess of bugs and be generally useless.

- Could you tell us more about the launcher, most importantly how the launcher could be used to collaborate and cover multiple platforms i.e. ‘TEK-9, Cyber-Gamer’ and how it would be done?

Luckily for me both TEK-9 and CyberGamer provide a RSS feed of all there news and forum topics, this allows me simply to grab the feed, break it down then place it into a ListView allowing people to get the latests news from both CyberGamer and TEK-9.



- As of recently, you decided to release the ‘Community Launcher’ in a ‘BETA’ state. Within that duration of time, did you feel you achieved and met the necessary requirements set?

The whole process took around a month, from going to a basic prototype to a released beta, this could have been shorted but due to college I was very limited with time. It also did not help a lot that I had to rewrite the launcher about four times, from reason range it is just such a mess, I need to use objects more then later deciding why the hell did I use objects and it is a was a waste of time on something this “small”. The requirements have forever grown for this project and are typically met on each release but there always seems to be a feature that could be added leaving me never any real time to completely say done.

- It seems like you’ve had quite an overwhelming response so far, however what has been the most problematic area of your launcher, and why has it been given so much criticism?

One of the real valid criticisms I have received is that the launcher is useless in general, while I understand it will never reach everyone, some people like to be able to launcher there COD4 normally, some people are happy to manually download patches, but ultimately there has been people using it and there has been people who felt the tool has saved them time and effort which is the end goal as well as spreading the word of the community. The other main concern people have just like with any piece of software written by some random guy is that it could contain big bad boogy men or maybe just a key logger, I understand people are wary but when some people understand that I want to help the community and have been a part of it for very long, even if that has been in the fringes, I would not do anything to jeopardise my chances of belong to it.

- You said to me earlier this morning that you’ve recently had some issues with the general integration of certain visuals and mechanics within the launcher. Has this been one of several technical barriers that have caused a significant loss of activity and thrive within the project since ‘BETA’?

Since the initial release and fixing of the inevitable errors the project has kind of stagnated, with the failure of people trying to help me with designs for a much more “pretty” launcher, I tried to integrate my own designs, while making these designs I kept wanting to change the program and the way it handled pictures Ect. This leaded to me getting annoyed and basically dropping the project.

Besides designing the launchers new look, I faced other challenges, some could be fixed by simply changing the way I handled it originally, other involved actual limitations with .NET focusing me to implement much more sufficient error checking and more.

- Apart from the problematic areas within your project, would you like to conclude this interview with any additional information that may be been unanswered as well as a potential release date?

Now I am back on track, soon there will be a nice design for the launcher, which I hope people like but I will point out I am not the most “arty” type, along with a new design there will be a much needed update fixing several bugs, removing debugging errors, including CyberGamer news and forums posts into the launcher and several bits and bobs. If these updates go well and once the errors get fixed then I will happily declare it out of beta.

- Again, it’s been a pleasure, Tom. Do you have any last words for the audience?

Um, a big thanks to you, Pales it has been fun and a quick shout out to Kezz and Kane who have been around with me for years now along with some old ET crew members, Dre, Mtdman and PasGlop as they will be friends I will never forget,